Re:A trip through the Graphics Pipeline
by psychphysic on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @04:44PM
(#33991028)
Thanks for the detailed answer!
Re:A trip through the Graphics Pipeline
by mewse on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @06:31PM
(#33992434)
The PS2 was actually kind of ahead of its time in this regard, with programmable vector units right there in the middle of the rendering pipeline; you could actually write the equivalent of vertex shaders and even simple geometry shaders *long* before those were available on standard home GPUs. (although you had to code them in assembly)
No fragment shaders, though, it's true.
If we instead look at something more modern like an early GeForce with programmable shaders what was typically done was to set up your regular rendering of a full screen quad and write a pixel shader which performs your desired computations instead of actual lighting calculations.
APIs such as CUDA and OpenCL were introduced to allow people who weren't making games to make GPU calculations without pretending that they were colour calculations.